Ethical standards for publication exist to ensure high-quality scientific publications. Plant Science Archives is committed to peer review integrity and practices the highest standards of ethical publishing as well as publication ethics encourages integrity in research & peer review process, and prohibit any malpractices regarding publication. The ethical issues in research may be violated in different ways:
Guest authorship /Co-authorship
All individuals who made significant scientific contributions to the research work should be given the opportunity to be included as co-authors. Other persons who contributed to the study should be acknowledged but need not be identified as co-authors. Every co-author should be aware of the content of an article to be submitted, agree to its submission and share appropriate responsibility for the work. Any individual unable to take appropriate responsibility for the article should not be included as a co-author.
Authorship disputes
Authorship is the process of deciding whose names belong on a research paper. In many cases, research evolves from collaboration and assistance between experts and colleagues. Some of this assistance will require acknowledgement and some will require joint authorship. Each person listed as an author on an article should have significantly contributed to both the research and writing. In addition, all listed authors must be prepared to accept full responsibility for the content of the research article.
Plagiarism and self-plagiarism
Authors should not use without attribution, text, concepts, data, figures, or tables from another work published either by others or by themselves. Plagiarism of others’ works and self-plagiarism are serious breaches of ethics and are not tolerated. If a direct quotation is appropriate, the original source should be properly cited. Figures, tables, and other images reproduced from another source normally require the publisher’s permission. Plant Science Archives scan for possible plagiarism by PlagScan software before sending for peer-review process.
Data management
The three issues for data management (ethical and truthful data collection, responsibility of collected data and data sharing) can be addressed by researchers before and during the establishment of a new research project. Ethical data collection refers to collecting data in a way that does not harm or injure someone. Harm and injury could range from outright physical injury to harmful disclosure of unprotected confidential health information. In comparison, truthful data collection refers to data that, once collected, are not manipulated or altered in any way that might impact or falsely influence results. Assigning and ensuring responsibility for collecting and maintaining data is one of the most important ethical considerations when conducting a research project.
Peer review
The two most important ethical concepts in the peer review process are confidentiality and protection of intellectual property. Reviewers should not know the author (or authors) they are reviewing and the author (or authors) should not be told the names of the reviewers. Only by maintaining strict confidentiality guidelines can the peer review process be truly open and beneficial. Likewise, no person involved in the peer review process- either the editor, reviewers, or other journal staff can publicly disclose the information in the article or use the information in a submitted article for personal gain.
Research fraud
Research fraud is publishing data or conclusions that were not generated by experiments or observations, but by invention or data manipulation. There are two kinds in research and scientific publishing:
Fabrication: Making up research data and results and recording or reporting them.
Falsification: Manipulating research materials, images, data, equipment or processes. Falsification includes changing or omitting data or results in such a way that the research is not accurately represented. A person might falsify data to make it fit with the desired end result of a study.
Conflict of interest
Any potential conflicts of interest (e.g: employment, stock ownership, patent licenses etc.) should be reported to the editorial office. These include personal, academic, political, financial and commercial gains.
Duplicate/Multiple/Simultaneous submission
Duplicate or multiple submissions is the most common ethics violation encountered. It is unethical for authors to publish articles describing essentially the same research result in more than one journal. It is also unacceptable for authors to submit the same manuscript concurrently to more than one journal.
Duplicate publication
Duplicate publication or self-plagiarism is the publication of an article that is identical or overlaps substantially with an article already published elsewhere, with or without acknowledgment.
Redundant publication
Redundant or repetitive publication is the publication of copyrighted material with additional new or unpublished data.